Seedbed of the twentieth century.

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber (among others) notes that Germany has finally acquitted its obligations under the Versailles treaty. Which makes one wonder, what was the greatest of the many errors at Versailles? I could write a post on this, as I have an opinion, but perhaps you would like to tell us, instead.

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There was, in the end, very little that was good about the post-1918 settlement. It was a concatenation of misconceptions, misapprehensions and hostages to fortune. And a small bucket of spite, just for good measure.

There was, in the end, very little that was good about the post-1918 settlement.

True, tho so little like WW1 had happened in Europe before. The War of the Spanish Succession may come closest, and that was pretty much a peace of exhaustion, not a French collapse on top of general exhaustion.

The casualties, the expense, the devastation, all seemed to suggest that something extraordinary was called for.

(Germany’s “reparations” imposed on France in 1870 probably didn’t set the best precedent, in retrospect; nor did the peace imposed at Brest-Litovsk.)

So they got it wrong, and they should’ve known better in some respects; yet we should allow for the magnitude of what the Allies had suffered and the novelty of their situation.

… OT, but since EOTAW has taken some interest in similar things, I must relay the GOP’s candidate for a House seat in Ohio, Rich Iott, who until recently enjoyed “re-enacting the exploits of an actual Nazi division, the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking, which fought mainly on the Eastern Front during World War II.” Comes with pictures and a recruitment video. No, I am not shitting you.

A unified Germany was less than 50 years old in 1919; breaking the reich into its (more or less) “larger” constituent parts (Baden, Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony-Wurttemberg,; possibly a recreated Hanover) would have left a half-dozen Netherlands-sized nations between the Baltic and Alps and between Poland and Rhine.

Pretty tough for Bavaria to try and take over the world 20 years later…

TF, one problem with that suggestion is that nationalism was in the saddle — Wilson famously favored redrawing the map along national lines. “National self-determination” was of course impossible in detail, but it remained the slogan. The Allies had a bad enough conscience about refusing to allow Austria to join with Germany.

The idea of breaking Germany into its constituent parts would not have worked.

*First, Prussia, as it was between 1860s and 1945, covered more than half of Germany. Even without Southern Germany, Prussia would have equaled France as an industrial power.
*Second, the idea of breaking up a nation state into smaller entities was something absolutely immoral for the nationalist thought prevalent in Europe in 1919. It would have been on par with genocide. It was a taboo, quite like regicide in the 17th century.
*Third, a broken-up Germany would have been antithetical to stability and peace in Europe. Any viable break-up would have meant the dissolution of Prussia, and then states like Eastern Prussia, Brandenburg and Saxony would have been unable to resist a Polish aggression. (An aggression by Poles was one of the major scenarios envisaged by the Reichswehr contingency planning in 1920’s.) Similarly, Western and Southern parts of Germany might have well succumbed to revolutions. This was not in the best interests of ententé.

Indeed; that the outcomes were almost all bad is not to suggest that anyone else in the same circumstances could have come up with something better. Sometimes, all the options suck. In history, quite often.

However, the WW I Allies encouraged the divisions and subsequent independence of various states of the former Austro-Hungarian empire; don’t really see how it made strategic sense for thr West for the Austrians and Hungarians to be sundered in 1919 and not the Bavarians and Prussians.

IIRC, Bavaria did declare its independence for a short time in this period – supporting it would have been prudent for the Allies. The results certainly would not have been any worse than what happened historically.

As far as the potential dominant position of a resulting Prussia, re-creating Hanover as a republic in the northwest to balance Prussia in the northeast would seem reasonable, especially if such a revived Hanover became a British ally/client in the same sense that Poland was French ally/client in the 1920s.

Speaking of Poland, however much the historical German military may have envisaged a “threat” from Poland in the 1920s, again, pretty tough for the POles to try and take over Europe 20 years later.

And I don’t see how there was any more or less risk of “reviolution” (defined as what? Wilhelm Groner or Bela Kum?) among these potential successor states if independent than there was otherwise; if anything, given the supremacy of the state in German politics in the 19th and 20th century, some revolutionary thinking about the importance of the people could not have hurt…

An interesting point of comparison here is the obvious Western support for the dissolution of the USSR in the 1990s.

The assignment of blame to Germany for a war that many held a share of the blame for stands out to me. The reparations were ridiculously high for a nation as exhausted as Germany was. In fact, I would say the whole enterprise at Versaille was screwed up from start. A treaty aimed at creating a peaceful and economically sustaninable Europe rather than one of fear and blame would been a better course. Of course its easy to say that when you haven’t suffered from the war experience.